On the Countercoup, and the Trials After

“Stop saying history will judge them. Judge them now. With judges.”—Joe Sandow, writing at the beginning of the Biden Administration

We forget that the Nuremberg trials were military tribunals; the victors in a war enforcing their will upon the losers. Some of the victors chose to do so by exacting justice but nothing constrained them to do so; the Soviets wanted to have show trials but failed to get the other participants to agree.

At Nuremberg law was created to prosecute the crimes of the Nazis. “Crimes against humanity” was invented to describe heinous acts previously unimagined. These concepts led to the writing, decades later, of the Rome Statute and the creation of the International Criminal Court.

Review: Griffin, The Nature of Fascism

Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

A remarkable and remarkably dense book on the nature of fascism. Griffin, who seems to have read everything about fascist, protofascist, and reactionary movements of the first half of the 20th century provides what is probably the best working definition of fascism: palingenetic ultranationalism; that is, a movement based on the idea of nationalist rebirth of a people. I’m not equipped to judge such a densely researched and reasoned book, literally the densest non-mathematical book I have ever encountered, but Griffin is widely respected, except among Marxist historians.

Brief Remarks on the US-Iran War

(I seem to be laying out a foreign policy position. May the ghost of George F Kennan guide me.)

Brief Remarks on Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan

Abdul El-Sayed appears to be an actually committed public health policy expert and advocate but as a politician he does not seem to care very much about people. The comparison, perhaps, is with Elizabeth Warren; genuinely good on economic issues but rotten on cultural issues. I don't think AeS appreciates the danger of the demons he has summoned with his antisemitic rhetoric or that he has alienated black voters in Michigan, a significant voting bloc.

On balance I want him in the Senate. I think his voice and vote on health policy will be valuable, but we are going to have to hold his feet to the fire on other issues, and he may not win because he's alienated an important group of voters.

In Defense of Bernie Sanders

I’ve been seeing a lot of shade thrown at Bernie Sanders, including a lot of outright lies, and I figured I’d gather up some of the positives, and lay them down here, so that there’s a record of them in a place I can refer to; I’m tired of reciting them, and getting nasty incoherent comments in reply. I also think that, despite these genuine positives, Sanders sometimes is a poor judge of character, as we have seen in his recent endorsements, and the man is 84, and perhaps losing his touch. But I remember, I still see sometimes, his critics lying about him, and twisting everything positive said about the man into a reason to hate him. That’s reading the sources the way fundamentalists read the bible, and the only possible result of such readings is to reinforce the readers’ biases. So I’ve gathered these up for people who haven’t seen some of them, and so I have a record for my own use.

AIPAC Does Not Make US Israeli Policy

[This was directed to someone who has bought into several antisemitic conspiracy theories. I fear I have lost her; this sort of thinking takes over people's minds.]

The Flapping of Butterfly Wings, July 28

There's some victim blaming going here. The party that failed to stop fascism partly failed to stop fascism because people tried very hard to keep it from stopping fascism. The Democrats have not had a substantial Congressional majority since, I think, the year 2000. If the voters wanted to vote out the Republicans--and remember, the Republicans stole the 2000 Presidential election--they could have done so at any time. We have Republican dominance because people voted for them. We can argue over why; generally I think racism and sexism, emerging in reaction to the successes of women's rights and Black rights in the 1960s handed the control of the country to racist misogynist reactionaries, who are now repeating the mistakes of the First Gilded Age, with added environmental and foreign policy mistakes.

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